Q: How do you convey to a child that you are not serving the food he wants right now because it is not healthy (ideally without becoming the meany he would think I was)? In this example, he wanted waffles (with lots of syrup) or pancakes or doughnuts. The child is already extremely obese. He is sensitive to his weight, so I sure wouldn't want to point out the connection about eating this and becoming even fatter, also to not make him feel bad about himself. I know when I want some dessert (that's what I call waffles and doughnuts), I wouldn't stop or even care now because of some consequences later. How do I get him to eat healthy without ruining our relationship or his self-esteem?
A: You're not going to like me for this answer. Keep Reading…
Golly gee, it's happened to me! My son, E, age 7, has turned into a pasta-craving picky eater. Fruits are fine, but bread products are preferred. Vegetables look to him like 4-inch hypodermic needles poised to pierce his skin. And everywhere we go, he notices the desserts. Life has become a never-ending negotiation about how much of this he has to eat before he gets some of that.
I tell you this not to brag (yeah, right), but so you will think, "Ha! Howie goes telling everyone else how to feed their kids and here he can't even do it right in his own home. What a fraud!"
No, wait. That's not right either. Keep Reading…
Weird night in Europe recently, according to the New York Times:
What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.
According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.
Juxtaposed against that black comedy in the paper's Most Emailed list was the story of another kind of invasion: the nightly encroachment of the "family bed babies" into mommy and daddy's sheets and blankets. For some reason, the article relates, the 1990s were the dawn of the co-sleeping era, when exhausted parents bought a few hours of sleep by sharing their beds, their warmth, and their heartbeats with their babies. The price - no more sex for the parents - was deemed a steep but fair deal.
Now, we're told, as those co-sleeping kids grow into large, gangly collections of limbs, they still insist upon invading their parents' beds nightly. And parental defenses appear inadequate: buying fancy Harry Potter-inspired 4-posters and Cinderella beds may delight the kids while the sun's up, but at night the family bed is the only hot spot in town.
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More articles like this one in: Ahhh!, Kids, Parenting, Balance, Rest, Energy, Gearing Down, Stressbusting, Rants, Disease, Newsletter
Q: I'm trying to get my girls to develop healthy eating habits, but one of them has a very strong sweet tooth and, I suspect, a genetic tendency toward a calorie-storing body type).
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Q: My daughter gets very worried and stressed about all sorts of things. I try telling her to calm down, but it doesn't help. How can I help her get more centered and calm when things aren't going her way?
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Two months ago, I chronicled my daughter Yael's first encounter with a unicycle. Yesterday, in balmy NC December sunshine, we took some more video. You'll notice in this 10-second clip that the posture is improved and the balance much more fluid. I predict a breaththrough within the next 4 hours of attentive practice.
Q: My kids visit me (the dad) pretty much every weekend, and I'm committed to feeding them nutritious food and teaching them about being healthy. But their mom, who's responsible for them during the week, lets them eat whatever they want. I don't want their visits with me to turn into "food fights" - any advice on how to handle this situation? Keep Reading…
Today's New York Times features an article about a branch of homeschooling known as "unschooling." More or less, it's the kind we practice in our home, first with our daughter and now with our son. The thing that struck me about this otherwise fine piece of reporting was a two-word phrase in a caption of a photograph in the multimedia slide show that accompanies the article. Keep Reading…
Hey, I like video games as much as the next guy… if the next guy is Mahatma Gandhi. Reuters (reported in The Age out of Australia) shared research on the cardiovascular effects of the video game "Dance Dance Revolution" on overweight kids. They found that while playing the game increased heart rate and burned more calories (than, for example, sitting on their butts watching other people dance on MTV), essentially, it made no difference to their weight or fitness. Keep Reading…
Q: How do I get a kid to change from being used to eating junk food to healthy food? Sugar and fat just make foods so much yummier and I imagine there's some major withdrawal from being used to sweet and fat foods.
A: Sugar and fat make foods yummy not because God hates us and wants us to look bad in bathing suits and spandex, but because these substances are chock full of easily digested calories. For most of history, living beings faced two big problems: getting a date on Saturday night, and getting enough food to stay alive during the famine. In those days, it made sense to load up on the calories you found in a big slab of animal fat or hanging from an extremely ripe fruit tree, because who knew if that was the last food you'd see in a week.
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